San Bernardino Mayor Carey Davis delivers his State of the City speech on Friday night at San Bernardino International Airport. Davis focused on the partnerships within San Bernardino during his speech.

City Council member Rikke Van Johnson speaks during the State of the City presentation on Friday night.

SAN BERNARDINO >> Before Mayor Carey Davis said a word at his first State of the City speech Friday night, audiences heard a message from nine other residents.

A Mormon bishop, a school employee, a business owner, an 11-year-old student, and others — only one, school board member Margaret Hill, an elected official — spoke briefly about each’s own past and goals and ended with the same sentence: “I am San Bernardino.”

Davis, sworn in as mayor of the bankrupt city a year ago this week, then immediately put the focus back on the audience.

“You are San Bernardino,” he said.

From there, the two-hour program took an unusual format, with portions of it being delivered not by the mayor himself but by other leaders focusing on their efforts and partnerships with the city.

For his portion of the address, which still represented a majority of the night, Davis was consistently upbeat and focused on partnerships.

“Together,” Davis said early on, “we are building a community and we are developing a series of strategic plans that will propel the city forward.”

The tone was a contrast to the last State of the City address delivered in the city, when then-Mayor Pat Morris warned in October 2013 that the city faced a “nightmare” and an urgent need to reduce spending, including outsourcing some services and closing some fire stations.

“I come to you with a different message,” Davis said. “In one year’s time, we have heeded these warnings. … Our city is not paralyzed by bankruptcy. There are many things that are happening that are raising the quality of life for our residents.”

The city still balanced its budget only because of bankruptcy protection and must adjust some of those debts in court, and faces $200 million in infrastructure that must be upgraded, he said. And so he said there must be three things: frank assessment, difficult decisions and public participation.

With a few exceptions, the speech did not specify changes to come, focusing instead on accomplishments.

And Davis did acknowledge toward the end of his speech that much of what he proposed would face resistance and “prove difficult,” but he said he was confident.

“We have challenges and hard work ahead of us, but if we change our focus and concentrate on how to achieve our destiny, we can succeed,” he said. “We are not where we want to be, but we will get there.”

One significant challenge being taken seriously was crime, Davis said, adding that the city was studying other cities focusing on crime.

He then invited Ray Culberson, director of the school district’s Youth Services Department, to make a presentation on a youth court intended to prevent young people from entering gangs or bring them out of them after a short time.

Eighty students will sit in judgment of their peers, Culberson said, then those students will transition into becoming jurors, with the goal of teaching responsibility.

“I’ve never met a young gangster who didn’t want a job when they were 12, 11, 10, 9,” Culberson said on a week when three people were killed in what police say was a gang-related shooting at Stingers nightclub. “Finding a way to improve the economy is important, but in the meantime, we need to shift mindsets.”

The speech was held in the domestic terminal of the San Bernardino International Airport, which, though it doesn’t offer commercial flights, Davis said was an example of progress such as an airport parts business and the sheriff’s coming aviation center.

Ryan Hagen covers the city of Riverside for the Southern California Newspaper Group. Since he began covering Inland Empire governments in 2010, he's written about a city entering bankruptcy and exiting bankruptcy; politicians being elected, recalled and arrested; crime; a terrorist attack; fires; ICE; fights to end homelessness; fights over the location of speed bumps; and people's best and worst moments. His greatest accomplishment is breaking a coffee addiction. His greatest regret is any moment without coffee.